Details

WE
MANUFACTURE BOOKS OF ALL TYPES.Soft cover, hard cover,
black and white text, 2 color text, and full color text. We work
with files of virtually any type, paper originals, or existing books
that require scanning. We do prepress processing and proofing on all
books we manufacture.

WE GO
BEYOND BOOK PRINTING FOR YOU.
We want
to make it easy for you to have your books printed. To do this we have
conquered all of the supporting areas that customers have asked us
about over the years.

WE SUPPORT YOUR DECISION-MAKING. When you are looking at long
lists of printers, all flashing their lights and waving their arms, how
do you decide who to use. The first-impression quote price can be very
misleading; the final price may be a lot higher. The quality of your
books may not be what you expect. The whole experience of dealing with
the printing company may be lengthy and unpleasant. A little care
at the beginning can save money, assure top quality, and make the whole
experience pleasant for you.

FILE UPLOADS and DOWNLOADS. We
use WeTransfer for file uploads. When you're ready to upload your
files, let us know and we'll e-mail a secure link that you can use
for your upload. This link is unique to you, and is not shared.
So your files are completely protected from prying eyes and hands.

We also use WeTransfer to send out any PDF proofs that are needed.

MEET YOUR
SCHEDULE NEEDS. Our normal turn-around time for perfect
bound books is 3 weeks, and for saddle-stitched books 2 weeks (plus whatever amount of
time you
want to review your proofs). For domestically produced Smythe sewn books or
full color books, the turnaround is normally 4-5 weeks.

For books
printed in Hong Kong, the turnaround is normally 4 weeks
(plus 4 weeks transit time). If you
have a pressing schedule requirement, the prices may be so attractive
that you can afford for us to air freight a "starter kit" of books,
and have them in your hands within a 4 week turnaround. With normal
economical ocean shipping, the transit time to your door is close
to 4
weeks. We have an excellent record of
meeting schedule commitments. We take pride in our excellent
service, competitive prices, top quality, and aggressive
scheduling.

If you have a critical schedule need, such as a book signing or
conference, please discuss your schedule with us. We
will develop a specific schedule based on your files-in date, proof
review turnaround, production time, and shipping time, and ink this
into our production schedules. Please do not base scheduling for a
critical event on the general guidelines given above. The
loading in the plant, time to obtain special paper, holiday and
vacation times, and other unknowns may affect the actual schedule.
The only way to be sure is for us to develop a specific schedule for
you.
And then, I suggest you allow some buffer time for things to go
wrong (snow storms, floods, transportation delays, etc.)

RUN LENGTH.
We do not normally quote for fewer than 500 copies of black and
white soft cover books or fewer than 300 copies of hard cover books
or books that are mostly in
color. We can produce any quantity above that which you want.
At the low end, it's all a matter of economics. As you can see from the
chart below, the unit cost -- the cost per copy -- starts
high and drops as the quantity of books increases.

Comparison
of Unit Cost for Various Order Quantities

Quantity

Relative
Unit Cost

300

175%

500

100%

1000

69%

2000

53%

5000

44%

This chart
compares the cost per book for various order quantities of perfect
bound black and white books. For
example, if you order 2000 books, then each book costs only half
(53%) as much as if you order 500 books. This is an example, not a universal formula.

A NOTE ON PRACTICAL
QUANTITIES. Not all combinations of specifications and
quantity will yield a price that is practical for you. For example, if
you are interested in buying 300 copies of an 8.5 x 11 full color book
with 400 pages, the unit cost will be very high. There may be a special
circumstance in which such a high cost is worth it for you -- for example, for a
special company consulting report. In most cases it just won't
work for general books you expect to sell. When we see such a circumstance, we will respond to
your quote request with a note about the high cost and information about
reducing the unit cost with larger quantities.

Want to Print Out pages
from this web site? If the image runs off the edge of your
sheet, set your printer to print Landscape. Then it'll fit.

Spam. We have found a solution to spam that works great for
us: www.spamstopshere.com
It works this way: Your e-mail traffic is routed through the servers at
spamstopshere, where it is tested against criteria that you can
customize. The most important filter eliminates e-mail with links
to known IP addresses or phone numbers for spammers. I don't use any of the
formulas that might stop e-mail that I want to be sure to receive. I don't
know of any e-mail that I've lost by accident, and my spam-in rate is
very low.

This spam filtering approach
avoids the inconvenience that some solutions impose on your
correspondents.

Anti-Virus.
We have also found a solution to viruses that works great for
us: NOD32
from Eset software. It does not seem to slow anything down. It was easy to set
up. It has a great record for catching viruses. You can get
more information at www.eset.com. (I haven't put a link here
because their web site won't let you return to here when you've finished
looking through their site.)

What's
a Page? Unfortunately the term "page" is used in
common conversation to mean two different things: a page or a leaf.
We count pages as the page numbers normally run. Each leaf in the
book has two pages, one on each side; in fact, each leaf has two pages
even if one of them is blank. There are twice as many pages as there are
leaves. If the pages in a book are numbered from 1 to 250, then
there are 250 pages in the book and 125 leaves. It's really
confusing to us when you ask for a quote with a page description of
"320 pages printed on both sides". To me that means 320
pages (160 leaves) and they are not blank on the back. If you mean 640
pages when you say this, we won't get your
quote right for you.

Moire. In printing, moire is a
pronounced and ugly pattern (checkerboard or parallel lines) that
results from the interaction (technically called interference)
of a screen pattern in the original image with the screening that's
necessary for making printing plates. Since moire results from this
interaction, it may show up on the final printed work but not in a
proof, and vice versa. There are no safe assumptions when it comes
to moire - except to not have screened images. The only safe
approach is to descreen any image that has a screen pattern;
that is, remove the visibility of the screen itself by carefully
blurring the image. The best time to do this is during
scanning of the screened image; most good scanners have a descreen
function that can accomplish this without noticeably degrading the
image.

Where does the screen pattern come from in the
first place? From scanning a printed image. In order for the
image to be printed in the first place, a screen had to be applied
during plate-making. You can easily see the screening in a newspaper
photo, and you can also see it in high quality images with a
magnifying glass.

What do I do now if I have images with a screen
pattern? Each image needs to be descreened. We use gaussian
blur in Photoshop, with the radius setting depending on the
details of each individual screen. The objective is to just barely
remove the visibility of the screen, so the process causes the least
harm to the image. This process has to be carried out on the
images, not on a finished layout file.

Pantone Colors. The Pantone Matching
System (pms) describes a huge range of colors for printing. Each
color corresponds to a specific ink that can be used, and many of
these colors can be closely approximated in 4 color process
printing. (Note "many" and "approximated"; some pms colors can not
even be approximated by 4 color process and many can not be exactly
matched).

When you are picking a color you want, say for
the background of a cover, the pms colors are convenient references,
as long as you realize (1) what you see on your monitor is not
exact, and (2) what can be printed in 4 color process does not
exactly match the pms color. But it's better than having to
say "you know, a kind of pinkish red that's not too light or pale".

You can see Pantone colors on the web at
http://www.pantone.com/pages/pantone/color_xref.aspx
and you can buy an ap for your iphone or ipad for $1.99 (as of this
writing) that gives you this information. Generally you'll be
interested in the guide for "coated" paper. There's
another ap that I like better, Color Expert. This ap will also show
you the best 4 color process approximation of each pms color.

Signature Book Printing
has
been a Book Printer
of choice for the past 25 years. We have been on the web since 1997. From the beginning, we have
focused not only on Book Printing but also on smooth,
easy customer service, excellent quality, and very
competitive prices .
We have broadened our Book Printing
offerings significantly from the beginning. Check out Signature Book
Printing as your Book Printer
. As a Book Printer
, we
have earned the confidence and recommendations
of a wide
variety of customers nationwide to support their
Publishing . Our capabilities include Hard Cover Book
Printing , Full Color Book Printing
, Case Bound Book
Printing , Perfect Bound Book Printing
, Smythe Sewn
Binding , Soft Cover Book Printing
, and Web Book Printing
for longer runs.